Relief for some Canadian viewers: CFMT in Toronto will be
showing season five. Start date is likely to be Jan-Feb 1998. CFMT
asks that viewers not call them for more information; when a schedule
is decided they'll announce it.

December 12, 1997

TNT's B5 Web site
has been updated and now features QuickTime versions of their
B5 advertisements, among other material.

Newsflash: Harlan Ellison will be chatting live on
CompuServe's
Book Preview Forum (GO PREVIEW) on October 17 at 10PM EDT.

An updated
letter from TNT
is available, with details on air dates, letterboxing, and more.

October 14, 1997

A
transcript
of the JMS chat session on Wild Wild Web on October 8 is available.

October 13, 1997

The following note from Dean Treadway at TNT may be cause for relief
for some viewers:

For those of you who are not getting the final four episodes of the
fourth season because your local station dropped B5 in October, we'll
see what we can do about getting those final four on some 1 am-5 am
slot sometime before Jan 19, but there's a strong possibility that it
might not happen. No promises. You'll hear about it if it happens,
through the TNT/B5 webpage, due to launch in early November.

The print ad and episode description in next week's
TV Guide
contain more spoilers for
"Between the Darkness and the Light"
than you may enjoy knowing. Read with caution. On the plus side, the
episode was picked as an Editor's Choice, hence the more detailed than
usual description.

September 14, 1997

Harlan Ellison will be chatting live in
America Online's
Globe Auditorium on September 17.

Newsflash: This week's
TV Guide
has a small
article
on Claudia Christian's departure. Contains some spoilers for season
five. There is also an
article
with Bruce Boxleitner's comments on her departure.

Newsflash: The B5 issue of
TV Guide
sold 12.5 million copies, on par with issues featuring
The X-Files,
according to JMS at a recent convention. They want to do another B5
cover later in the year. Thanks to everyone who participated in the
buying campaign.

An updated
letter from TNT
answers questions about season five, their plans for reruns,
international distribution, air schedules, and more. Check
it out before you send them mail asking for information.

Updated the
US episode list
to include information about TNT's rebroadcast of seasons 1-4, as
well as the latest news about season 5 renewal. Switched the date
format to be consistent with the rest of the per-country schedules.

June 27, 1997

Newsflash: Babylon 5 has been renewed for a fifth season,
according to an announcement by Harlan Ellison on "The
Late Late Show." Season five will air on cable network
TNT.
The start date, which presumably will come after the remainder of season
four airs on PTEN, is unknown; it's also unknown whether the PTEN
stations will get the first season-five episode in exchange for
"Sleeping in Light,"
which will now air at the end of season five, or which episode will be
shown at the end of season four in foreign markets. More news as it's
available.

Newsflash: The renewal announcement from Warner Bros., if one occurs,
may not happen until July, judging by a recent
message from JMS.
(The message is all the information I have; when there's more news
you'll see it here.)

Newsflashes: the June 5 issue of the Christian Science Monitor has
a B5 article, as does the June 9 issue of Newsweek magazine.

The episode guide and synopsis screenshots are now in JPEG format
rather than GIF format. In most cases, this should result in
improved load time (JPEG typically produces smaller output than GIF
for these types of images) and, for people with 16-bit (64K) or higher
color depth, much nicer-looking images.

Newsflash: JMS and John Copeland will be chatting live on
America Online
Monday, June 2 at 9PM Eastern time. Go to keyword "Babylon 5".

Some of the inline images in the Guide will probably switch over to
JPEG format soon. I've changed the Lurker's Guide logo on the home
page to a JPEG image as a test; unless I'm deluged with complaints
the change will happen sometime in the next week. Images that work
better in GIF format, such as buttons, will stay GIF.

For those of you who're curious about this kind of thing, in the course
of making the decision I compiled a list of the most popular Web
browsers used to access the Lurker's Guide. The following are the
most popular browsers out of the last 933945 accesses to the "This
Week's Episode" link on the Lurker's Guide home page, which should be
a representative sample of the user base. Note that this just measures
fetches of that one URL; images aren't included in these totals.

Newsflash:
The Lurker's Guide is moving!
Please update your bookmarks and links to point to
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html
instead of the Hyperion address. There was a legal dispute over the
old name, and we settled out of court (that's all we're allowed to
disclose under the terms of the agreement.)

Many people have written to point out that the guide page for
"The Long Night"
doesn't have much material yet. I'm getting over a nasty flu; the
page will be updated when I've recovered. Thank you for your patience.

More on the cookies as described in January 8's entry. It occurred to
me today that to implement the feature, it wasn't necessary
to have the Web server set cookies on every hit, which unfortunately
was my only choice given the server software we're running. It will
suffice to simply have the per-user what's new page, a CGI script,
do it. Folks who refuse cookies will be relieved to see that they
no longer have to do it for every image on every page (though I
consider Netscape's behavior in that regard a pretty serious
user-interface flaw, and Internet Explorer is no better.)

January 8, 1997

We've started running a new version of our Web server software.
You may have noticed that the Guide is now setting cookies
in your browser; there's a reason for that. I plan to use them to
put together a "What's new since your last visit" page, so you can
come to the site and jump instantly to all the latest material. To
do that, the Guide needs to distinguish you from other users, and
cookies are the most convenient way to do it. About 95% of the
Guide's users use browsers that support cookies, according to my
most recent statistics.

Some concern has been expressed that they'll be used to collect
demographic information. In fact, I have no use for that; I can't
accept ads or otherwise use the Guide to make money since it's not
officially sanctioned by Warner Bros. To the extent that I eventually
do any usage tracking beyond keeping track of the time of your last
visit, it'll be to see what the most common paths through the Guide are
so I can make it more convenient for frequent users. (But detailed
tracking like that isn't even on my to-do list yet; just the fancy
what's-new feature is plenty of work.)

January 7, 1997

The long-overdue
Universe pages
for season four are online. They should still be considered works
in progress (there are a couple portraits missing, for example)
but they should be helpful for new viewers.